Technology news

Aspiring space tourism outfit Virgin Galactichas just announced its readiness to shift its operations to New Mexico’s Spaceport America, from which the company’s first commercial flights will take off. “Virgin Galactic is coming home to New Mexico where together we will open space to change the world for good,” said Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson at a press event.
The plan isn’t exactly a surprise, since Virgin Galactic and New Mexico collaborated on the creatio

A defamation case filed last year against Teslaand SpaceX CEO Elon Muskafter he repeatedly called a British cave diver “pedo guy” will go to trial on October 22, a U.S. district judge determined Friday.
Vernon Unsworth, the British cave diver, filed a defamation lawsuit in September 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after Musk called him a “pedo guy” and made other statements insinuating he was a pedophile in a public attack on Twitter

When I reviewed Dyson’s V10 last year, I finally understood why people were willing to pay such a premium for the company’s vacuums. But testing Tineco’s Pure One S12 the past couple of weeks has been a reminder that there are versatile alternatives that give you more for your money. The S12 comes in four packages, ranging from $449 at the entry level to $699 for the most goodies thrown in; I tested the $599 configuration. My first thought was that it looked a lot like a

GitHub today announced the launch of a limited beta of the GitHubPackage Registry, its new package management service that lets developers publish public and private packages next to their source code.
To be clear, GitHub isn’t launching a competitor to tools like npm or RubyGems. What the company is launching, however, is a service that is compatible with these tools and allows developers to find and publish their own packages, using the same GitHub interface they use for their code. The

Ouch. Yikes. Oof. Sigh.
Those are some of the friendlier phrases I imagine came out of the mouths of bankers, investors, executives and really anyone who has been paying close attention to Uber’sroad to the stock markets today when the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange below its initial public offering price.
The ride-hailing business (NYSE: UBER), previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists, priced its stock at $45 apiece for a valuation of $82.4 billion on Thursd

Speaking today at The Next Web’s 2019 conference, author and futurist Gabe Zichermann gave an account of various industries that got stronger through failures, rather than successes. As he put it, sometimes you have to fail in order to find the success — and there are several examples of industries and people who made their failures work to their advantage. One in particular stood out for just how many failures had to happen before it became what it is today: namely, the aviation in

Tinder is preparing to launch a version of its popular dating app aimed at users in emerging markets. The app, which will be called “Tinder Lite,” offers a smaller, more lightweight version of the current flagship app, the company says. Smaller app size is a defining characteristic of most of today’s “Lite” apps, which are specifically focused on addressing the unique needs of users in areas where data usage, bandwidth and storage space is a concern.
Most major tech

The Department of Defense isn’t sure how many websites it runs. Stars and Stripes reports that at an event last month, US Army Colonel Paul Haverstick, the acting director of the Defense Media Activity at Fort Meade, Maryland said that the number of websites that the Pentagon runs is “undefined.”The Defense Media Activity is the US military’s multimedia outreach operation, covering the publication of official outlets, such as Army News, Air Force News, Marines News, and

Game of Thrones has never been about giving readers or viewers what they most want. Its author and screenwriters prefer to build fan expectations, then overturn them for narrative impact and, sometimes, pure shock value. Yet, fans maintain hope that at least a few of the characters will reach a satisfying, well-deserved ending. So it’s time for the return of Game of Thrones Hope Chest, the weekly poll where we put all of our hopes together in one place. We aren’t asking what you thi

Back Market, a marketplace for refurbished tech, is offering Verge readers a chance to save 10 percent on any of its refurbished products, including iPhones, laptops, drones, and more. Once you find what you’ve been looking for, enter the code BMVERGE at the “confirm and pay” screen to knock a few dollars off of your total cost. This deal is active until Mother’s Day comes to an end in the US on Sunday, May 12th.
The site doesn’t currently have many recent Android

A defamation case involving Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a British cave diver will go to trial on October 22nd, according to recent court filings. Vernon Unsworth sued Musk for defamation last year after Musk repeatedly accused Unsworth of being a pedophile. A judge rejected Musk’s claim that he wasn’t making a real accusation — in part because of a potentially damning email Musk sent to BuzzFeed. “A reasonable fact-finder could easily conclude that [Elon Musk’s] statem

Uberfinally made its debut Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, ending its decade-long journey from startup to publicly traded company.
So far, it’s been a ho-hum beginning, with shares opening at $42, down from the IPO price. The share price is hovering just under $44.
Thirteen people, including executives, early employees, drivers and customers, were on the balcony for the historic bell ringing that opened the markets Friday. Noticeable absentees were co-founder Garrett Campand former

On Thursday, the Justice Department charged a Chinese hacking group with carrying out one of the largest criminal hacks in United States health care history that resulted in 79 million people having their personal information stolen.
In the four-count indictment cited by the Justice Department, officials allege Wang Fujie, 32, and another man referred to only as John Doe intruded US computer systems, including Anthem, a health insurance giant, and three other businesses between February 2014 an

Every so often, a big corporation manages to play the news cycle just right. Generally such things aren’t recommended and can fairly easily backfire, but the MillerCoors-owned Blue Moon Brewery would have been silly not to have capitalized on yesterday’s big announcement from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
Sodowe https://t.co/jEHNRhHRHq
— Blue Moon Brewing Co (@BlueMoonBrewCo) May 9, 2019The company fired off a silly tweet yesterday and is doubling down with the announcement o

Zach Lieberman is an extremely busy person. He’s a designer, computer programmer, educator, and artist (he’s also one of my biggest inspirations). Among other things, he’s one of the creators of openFrameworks, an open-source C++ library that is one of the coolest ways to dive into making striking visuals with code. A lot of his work is interactive and playful in unexpected ways — which just so happens to be one of his goals.Recently Lieberman has been teaching at the Sc

Last month, Amazon revealed that it would be working to cut its free Prime shipping in half from two days down to one, and it appears the company has already started rolling out the feature in some areas, as spotted by SlickDeals.The Verge has been able to confirm the new option showing up on various Prime items (as pictured below), with a new “Prime FREE One-Day” label replacing the usual two-day promise. The new one-day shipping times appear to be rolling out slowly — my acc

Don’t like the idea of your baby guzzling down liquid candy all day? It may surprise you to find corn syrup is the main ingredient in most infant formulas in the U.S. That’s where Bobbie, a Bay Area-based baby formula delivery startup promising only wholesome ingredients, hopes to fill in.
Just go down the baby food aisle of any supermarket in America and start reading the ingredients and you’ll likely find corn syrup, soy bean oil, glucose syrup, maltodextrin and palm oil at t

Avengers: Endgame didn’t have a post-credits scene when it was first released, but that’s about to change — screenings will now come with the second trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home attached after the credits.
The new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer, which is so full of Endgame spoilers that it came with its own spoiler warning, dropped earlier this week. Now, Endgame screenings will feature a message from Spider-Man actor Tom Holland suggesting audiences should hang ar

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.Uber opens at a disappointing $42 per shareAt long last, it’s lift-off for Uber .
After pricing its initial public offering at $45 per share — at the bottom end of the range it set previously — to raise $8.1 billion, the transportation company began trading today on the New York

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to Watch
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film noir set in an alternate version of Golden Age Holly

Some of the most famous scientific discoveries happened by accident. From Teflon and the microwave oven to penicillin, scientists trying to solve a problem sometimes find unexpected things. This is exactly how we created phosphorene nanoribbons – a material made from one of the universe’s basic building blocks, but that has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of technologies. We’d been trying to separate layers of phosphorus crystals into two-dimensional sheets. Instea

Uber’s much heralded public offering has arrived not so much with a bang as with a whimper, thanks largely to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
Overnight, the U.S. government made good on the threat from President Donald Trump to hike tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25% up from 10%.Trump’s China tariffs are getting a major increase on FridayAs a result, stock markets slid further on Friday, and their decline hit Uber’s initial public offering.

The sports-focused streaming service fuboTVwill soon follow the rest of the industry by offering its own free and ad-supported streaming channel, in addition to its paid subscription, sometime later this year. The news was exclusively shared with The Wrap (paywalled) in an interview with fuboTV co-founder and CEO David Gandler.
FuboTV confirmed the accuracy of the report to TechCrunch, but declined to provide further details about its forthcoming plans.
Gandler characterized its ad-supported vid

GoPro is off to a good start in 2019 after generating $243 million in revenue, a 20 percent increase over its first quarter last year. While the camera company did post a loss of $24 million, that’s way down from the $76 million loss GoPro suffered to start 2018. The company was confident enough after posting these results on Thursday that it raised its guidance to investors for 2019 and said it will turn its first annual profit since 2015, which was the first full year of sales for the p

Technology is very much in the business of, quite literally, changing the world. When I was deciding whether to write for TechCrunch, I tried to imagine a human life on this planet, in 20 or 30 years, that would not have been dramatically impacted in one way or another by the new technologies we’re creating today.
I couldn’t picture such a person, so I decided this ongoing series on tech ethics was the right thing to do with my time.
Below is the second part of my interview with Chan